Read The Murder of Princess Diana Online
Authors: Noel Botham
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Royalty, #Princess Diana, #True Accounts, #Murder & Mayhem, #True Crime, #History, #Europe, #England, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Communication & Media Studies, #Media Studies
The Murder of Princess Diana (21 page)
Charles flew on to Balmoral to be with his sons, and Jane Fellowes, Sarah McCorquodale and Paul Burrell followed the hearse to a London undertaker where the princess’s personal doctor, Dr. Peter Wheeler, was waiting. He explained that an autopsy would now have to be performed in accordance with British law before Diana’s coffin could be taken to lie in state in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. Any autopsy done in Paris would not count. The autopsy was performed in Hammersmith and Fulham Mortuary in West London by the then coroner to the Queen’s household, Dr. John Burton, and his deputy, Dr. Michael Burgess, the current coroner.
As long ago as 2000, a memorandum prepared by French pathologists Professors Lecomte and Lienhart, who handled the embalming in Paris, suggests that British authorities, including the royal coroner Dr. Burton, had interceded to conceal some aspects of the official British autopsy. The two French doctors were in London in June 1998, where they met with coroners Burton and Burgess, forensic pathologist Dr. Chapman, and Scotland Yard superintendent Jeffrey Rees. They were given copies of the English autopsy report on Princess Diana, but, according to their contemporaneous notes on the meeting, were told that the document was provided for their “private and personal use,” and that it should not be included in the formal file of Judge Stephan, which would have become automatically available to solicitors representing other interested parties in the French probe.
This suppression of the Lecomte–Lienhart memorandum raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the “official” autopsy of the Princess of Wales, including questions that arose at the time of her death as to whether she was pregnant.
FOURTEEN
Twenty-four hours after the crash, two incidents took place at two separate addresses in London which bore a remarkable similarity to each other.
At 3
A.M.
, Lionel Cherruault, a London-based photojournalist, was woken at his home in Mobray Road by his wife’s screams. She had looked downstairs and seen that the front door was wide open. The police were called and Cherruault discovered, on checking his studio, that they had been robbed. His car had been moved and his wife’s car stolen while they and their daughter had been asleep. The only thefts from the house were computer discs and electronic equipment used for storing and transmitting photographs. The discs contained a vast library of royal pictures, and were the main targets.
A.M.
, Lionel Cherruault, a London-based photojournalist, was woken at his home in Mobray Road by his wife’s screams. She had looked downstairs and seen that the front door was wide open. The police were called and Cherruault discovered, on checking his studio, that they had been robbed. His car had been moved and his wife’s car stolen while they and their daughter had been asleep. The only thefts from the house were computer discs and electronic equipment used for storing and transmitting photographs. The discs contained a vast library of royal pictures, and were the main targets.
The previous morning, just after the crash in Paris, Cherruault had been offered photographs of the tunnel crash—but the deal collapsed after Diana died. Even the police admitted it was no ordinary burglary. Cash, credit cards and jewelry were in full view when the computer equipment was stolen, but had not been touched. Expensive cameras and lenses were also ignored. “They had shut down the computers and actually removed all the hard drives,” said Lionel Cherruault. “The next day, a man came to see me wearing a gray suit. He also had gray hair. He told me I had been targeted, not burgled, and hinted at government involvement. He said, ‘You can call them what you like—MI5, MI6, MI7, MI9, Special Branch or local henchmen—anything you like. But that person who came to your house had a key into your house and knew exactly where to go. But not to worry, your lives weren’t in any danger.’ ”
Three hours earlier, and a few miles away in North London, Darryn Paul Lyons’s photo laboratory was also broken into by mysterious raiders. By 3
A.M.
on August 31 he had received crash photos, sent electronically from Paris by computer, from Laurent Sola, following a phone call shortly after 12:30
A.M.
High-resolution photos were received and Lyons, who runs Big Pictures photo agency, was negotiating deals with British and American outlets. The deals were called off after Sola telephoned with news of Diana’s death.
A.M.
on August 31 he had received crash photos, sent electronically from Paris by computer, from Laurent Sola, following a phone call shortly after 12:30
A.M.
High-resolution photos were received and Lyons, who runs Big Pictures photo agency, was negotiating deals with British and American outlets. The deals were called off after Sola telephoned with news of Diana’s death.
The following night between 11
P.M.
, August 31 and 12:30
A.M.
, September 1, the power to Lyons’s office was mysteriously cut. “When I returned to the office that night at 12:30
A.M.
with colleagues I found I couldn’t turn on any of the lights,” he said, in his statement to police. “It seemed as though we had suffered a power cut. But other offices in the same building, and in other buildings nearby, remained alight, and the street lights were working. I heard an indistinct noise, like ticking, and thought a bomb was on the premises, so I told everyone to get out and called the police.”
P.M.
, August 31 and 12:30
A.M.
, September 1, the power to Lyons’s office was mysteriously cut. “When I returned to the office that night at 12:30
A.M.
with colleagues I found I couldn’t turn on any of the lights,” he said, in his statement to police. “It seemed as though we had suffered a power cut. But other offices in the same building, and in other buildings nearby, remained alight, and the street lights were working. I heard an indistinct noise, like ticking, and thought a bomb was on the premises, so I told everyone to get out and called the police.”
Lyons told police he believed secret-service agents had broken into his office and either searched the premises or planted surveillance and listening devices there.
Just hours after they arrested seven paparazzi, the police and judiciary in Paris knew that these men would never be found guilty of causing Diana’s death. Even though they would play out the charade and go on to arrest three other photographers who had leaped, like camera-toting ghouls, around the dying princess, the police were certain they could never be held responsible for the crash. The witnesses were adamant. Disgusting though their behavior had been, the paparazzi were just not there when the Mercedes hit the concrete pillar.
The word from above was still the same, though—and growing impatient. A quick and simple answer must be found. The unprecedented outpouring of public grief in England had taken the government and the royal family by surprise. No one had doubted Diana’s popularity, but her death had tapped into a level of emotional reaction which transcended anything on record.
Whispers of assassins having been unleashed in Paris had already begun. No one wanted to believe that a simple traffic accident could rob them of the vibrant, passionate young woman—the People’s Princess, as Tony Blair dubbed her in an emotional eulogy which reflected a nation’s thinking. If the assassination rumor took hold, or the official French inquiry became bogged down for any length of time with no official information being released, then there was no knowing how angry the masses might become or how they might react.
A well-founded police belief is that more than eighty percent of road traffic accidents are the fault of the driver. So in their search for a culprit, the French authorities automatically turned their attention to Henri Paul. French officials believed then, as they do now, that no one would ever know the real truth. There was enormous pressure on them all to wrap it up quickly and produce a verdict. That not everything was fully investigated, or is ever going to be fully investigated, was never of great concern to the Criminal Brigade. The obvious answer—that it was the driver’s fault—appealed to everybody. It was such a natural explanation: obvious and therefore good.
First inquiries had revealed surprisingly mixed background information about the forty-one-year-old bachelor, some of it highly conflicting. On the one hand there emerged the profile of a quiet, almost shy, unassuming man, loyal to his tight-knit circle of close friends, who was a keen and competitive tennis player with an unusual hobby—flying light airplanes. As a boy he had won prizes for playing the violin and piano, and he had a passion for Liszt and Schubert. People saw him as a rather serious, slightly correct, though sociable type, and a modest drinker. Three of his closest friends swore they had never seen him the worse for wear through drink.
The more sinister side that emerged was of a professional seller of secrets, a man contracted to a host of intelligence-agency masters—at the right price. Among other secret services which employed him, Henri Paul was an agent for MI6. He had joined the Ritz Hotel in 1986, tipped off to the vacancy by a policeman friend, and was soon “helping” local police, French Intelligence and various foreign agencies with their inquiries. With the flow of business tycoons, film celebrities, foreign statesmen, arms dealers and international criminals through the hotel, a security executive was well placed to uncover much sought-after information about its clientele. As acting head of security he had a twenty-strong staff, and knew what was happening in every nook and cranny in the building.
To the French authorities, Henri Paul made an attractive villain. The police believed they could conceal some of the more unsavory aspects of his work for them and still present him as a suitably repulsive character who received large payments from selling the personal secrets of trusting guests like Princess Diana to the scavenging jackals of the international intelligence community. Add to this the emotive “facts” that he was a drunk alcoholic and driving at 120 miles per hour when the car crashed, and it could be guaranteed that little sympathy would flow in Paul’s direction.
It is now accepted that the blood sample purporting to come from Henri Paul’s body had not been analyzed by the time the statement came from the Criminal Brigade and the judiciary on September 1 that he had been three times over the French legal drink limit, with 1.75g of alcohol per liter of blood.
On September 1, Judge Hervé Stephan had still not been appointed; neither had his assistant, Judge Marie-Christine Devidal. So just who did authorize the leak about the alcohol content of Paul’s blood, and why? Under France’s archaic secrecy laws, no announcement should have been made at that time. It is impossible to discover who was responsible for ordering the official leak. But the authorities, fronted by the Criminal Brigade, between them, had chosen a perfect fall guy, and wanted the public to know about him.
Henri Paul was “as drunk as a pig,” said the leak, with the equivalent of two bottles of wine or a dozen whiskies having been guzzled that night, and careening madly along at 120 miles per hour when he lost control and rammed the concrete pillar in the Alma tunnel. This dramatic and evocative statement made headlines around the world which, according to a reliable police source in Paris, was the principal idea. “It certainly stopped people speculating about other reasons for the crash,” he said, and when a second leak, eight days later, confirmed the alcohol levels and added that Paul had also taken Prozac, a prescription drug to shake off depression, and Tiapridal, a drug to cope with the side effects of alcoholism, the character assassination was complete.
“A frightening cocktail of drugs and booze,” doctors were quoted as saying, “made him totally unfit to drive.” The drugs, combined with the alcohol, would have caused him to act even more irresponsibly, it was claimed. That the traces of the two drugs found in the hair samples were too small to measure was conveniently omitted from the police leak. They were levels of someone taking medication—not an indication of drug abuse.
At that time police were maintaining the car was traveling at between 90 and 100 miles per hour when it crashed. But the Criminal Brigade knew that this information was untrue. They already knew the real speed of the Mercedes to have been sixty-four miles per hour when it crashed. That was the speed stamped on the speed-camera photograph taken only a couple of seconds before impact at the tunnel entrance. That picture of the Mercedes, time-stamped with the speed and date, was shown to French journalist Patrick Chauvel by a disgruntled traffic cop, whose department’s investigation of the crash was summarily rejected by the Criminal Brigade. The photograph, a copy of which I have seen, was also in Judge Stephan’s files.
Yet this was by no means the most blatant omission the Criminal Brigade deliberately made in its leaks. Nowhere was it mentioned that the blood tests on Henri Paul had revealed a major alien constituent in his blood which they should not have found there, and for which there is no acceptable explanation. Had an independent investigation, undertaken by the Ritz Hotel and handled by ex-Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent John McNamara, not obtained copies of the original pathology reports, it is certain the police would never have revealed these vitally important, and from their point of view extremely embarrassing, concealed facts; and it is equally unlikely that Judge Stephan would have included them in the truncated version of his report that was eventually published.
As it is, the facts did not come to light until June 1998—ten months after the crash and after Henri Paul had been found guilty, worldwide, of having caused the death of Princess Diana.
The police had intended these hidden files to remain concealed forever. The shock revelation that they had been ferreted out was catastrophic news for the Criminal Brigade. The blood samples, allegedly coming from Henri Paul, contained massive levels in the one, and almost lethal levels in the second, of carbon monoxide—the kind of levels that are normally only found in a car-exhaust suicide victim. The attempts to explain the levels, 12 percent in the sample of blood from the femoral vein, and 20.7 percent from the heart, were scientifically and medically nonsensical.
The report by French pathologists on their autopsy on what was allegedly Henri Paul’s body is hardly one which inspires confidence.
The time that the autopsy was carried out was not noted on the report; neither was the duration of the pathologists’ investigation. There were also a number of obvious errors, including a statement in one part of the report that his cervical column was intact, whereas elsewhere it is described as being fractured. There is not even a description of how Henri Paul’s body was identified as being his.
The pathologists concluded that during the few breaths he might possibly have taken immediately following the crash, he inhaled carbon monoxide which was leaking from the airbag. This was sufficient, they claimed, when taken in conjunction with carbon monoxide already in his blood from an allegedly high level of cigarette smoking, to produce similar levels of carbon monoxide to those which were found in his body.
The process of movement of carbon monoxide and carboxyhemoglobin would be as follows. From the lung it travels to the left side of the heart, from where it is circulated through the body and then returns to the right side of the heart. This makes the assumption that such circulation as described above was in the process of taking place in the body of Henri Paul, producing a very high level of carbon monoxide in his heart and a high, albeit lower, level of carbon monoxide in his limbs.
Four incontrovertible facts make nonsense of this pathetic attempt by supposedly professional physicians to explain the inexplicable.
1. Mercedes-Benz states categorically that their airbags do not contain any carbon monoxide.2. There was no other source of carbon monoxide in the Mercedes enabling Henri Paul to gasp in large amounts in his dying moments, as confirmed by the absence of carbon monoxide in the other victims’ blood.3. The French autopsy report states, as fact, that on impact, the thoracic aorta of Henri Paul was ruptured. “The flow of blood from the left side of the heart must have stopped at that moment,” says a team of four renowned pathologists acting for Henri Paul’s family.Professors John Oliver and Peter Vanezis of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Glasgow, and Professors P. Mangin and T. Krompecher of the Institut de Médecine Legale of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, unanimously concluded that, “There could have been no passage of carbon monoxide from the left side of the heart to the rest of the body, and none could have returned to the right side of the heart. Accordingly, the high level of carbon monoxide in the sample of blood taken from the limb simply cannot be explained as resulting from inhalation of carbon monoxide from any source, and as the pathologists themselves appear to accept, cannot be explained merely by smoking.“An even more fundamental issue is that since there could have been no passage of carboxyhemoglobin from the left to the right side of the heart, probably no more than in the range of 5 percent to 8 percent would be found in the blood of a heavy smoker.“The pathologists’ findings and conclusions on the issue, for reasons explained, are physically impossible and cannot be sustained.”4. Had Henri Paul had these levels of carbon monoxide in his blood at the time of the autopsy, it is estimated, using known rates of decrease in percentage per hour, then the level of carbon monoxide in his blood in the hour before the crash would have been at least thirty percent.This is a near fatal level. Experts state that he would have been suffering from blinding headaches, probably vomiting and would have had great difficulty in walking properly. The brain, being deprived of oxygen, would not function correctly. Distance and time would be difficult to judge and he would lack coordination.
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